Imran Qureshi Where the Shadows are so Deep @ The Curve

The Curve

The Curve is an exhibition space at the Barbican, just inside the Silk Street entrance. It is a 90-metres-long, narrow but very high and gently curving room, which follows the contour of the main auditorium above it.

Imran Qureshi

The Barbican commissions contemporary artists to create works or installations to fill the Curve and it is currently showing an installation by Pakistani artist, Imran Qureshi, titled Where the Shadows are so Deep. Qureshi is an award-winning painter of miniatures – ornate, exquisite, delicately-coloured, small (18 inches tall?) paintings in a tradition which goes back to the Mughal emperors of India.

He has created 34 exquisitely detailed miniatures for this, his first exhibition in London.

Threatened by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection of Amna and Ali Naqvi, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Blood stains

But the small paintings are not the first thing you see. The first thing you see is a spotlight highlighting a big spattery bloodstain on the floor. Looking up you realise there are similar large splats of blood spaced across the floor and disappearing around the Curve. And on the wall too, lots of bloody shellbursts with one particular example of something horrible daubed onto the wall maybe 20 feet up, and then long strands of dried blood trickling down to the floor.

Early part of the installation showing bloodstains on floor and wall

Looking closer you can see that what at first looks like chaotic splatters of blood (presumably paint) has been graced with white flecks and swirls to introduce shape and pattern. In fact some of the blood stains, on closer examination, are turned by this white flecking into the petals and whorls of large flowers, like enormous, blood-red roses. The twenty-foot cascade of blood is turned by its white curlicues into plaits of blood-red rope or hair. Rapunzel in the abattoir.

Blood spatter turning into a flower (?)

Even some of the frames of the miniatures are blood sprinkled or contain what look like blood stains across their surfaces (see the fourth image, below).

The effect is of a slaughterhouse – as if big mammals have been eviscerated here and their blood spurted across the floor, walls and exhibits. The echoes of their dying screams reverberate silently around the curving space…

And Will There Be A Spring When The Garden is Unblighted by Imran Qureshi (2014)Private Collection (Hong Kong)

The miniatures

Only after you’ve taken in this, the gloomy blood-soaked environment, do you lean in to see the individual paintings. They are portrait shaped, and almost all depict stylised trees or bushes, described with incredibly fine and precise brush or pen strokes, against a variety of idealised backgrounds in solid washes of subdued colour – scarlet or orange or olive.

All the works are painted on wasli, ‘also referred to as wasli paper, a type of handmade paper used specifically for painting miniatures’ (Wikipedia). Some are covered in shining gold leaf, some leave the paper bare and exposed, there is an understated ringing of themes and variations.

The images are hung at various heights – a few by the floor, one or two too high up to be examined in detail. Quite often, superimposed onto the image are vertical cascades of tiny silver droplets, like beaded curtains. Rain? Snow? Tears?

Only in one painting that I could see does a human figure, rather reluctantly, appear. These are strange and mysterious landscapes, untroubled by human presence… Many of the paintings have small passages of Arabic script written in blue ink – The title of the work? A quote? It remains mysterious.

But even the pictures themselves are not exempt from the surrounding carnage. Right from the start blood red tendrils have woven in and out of the trees or bushes. In some images red blood cascades down over the fictional landscape, blood red capillaries climb up bushes and blood red blotches even stain the parchment itself.

And Will There be A Spring When the Garden is Unblighted by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection of Amna and Ali Naqvi, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Into the darkness

As you saunter further along the Curve it gets darker. Blood spatters continue to mark floor and wall right until the end but are harder to make out as you walk into almost total darkness, the lighting progressively diminishing. By the end only tiny, focused spotlights point out the rectangles of art and beauty, the miniature paintings creating light in the darkness, beauty balancing blood.

Into the darkness

Not only does the gallery darken, so do the pictures. In three of the final four the landscape has ceased to be green or orange or gold but has become blasted black. Low thorn bushes appear on the rim of this terrain and, along with the darkness you are now standing in, it is impossible to avoid a premonition of complete disaster. The desolation of a nuclear blast.

Over the blackened waste land hover fleets of white-winged dragonflies, which have flitted in and out of the miniatures from the start. You can see them clearly in the first three paintings, above.